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Funny thing was, of course, that WAS true at the time, but it wasn't a reason not to do it. Let that be a lesson to anyone who hasn't learned the lesson themselves yet!
One question: Being noob at OS stuff, I feel quite impressed that bash and GCC could work on the Linux that Linus built on his own. But everybody says that Linux really was something interesting as soon as a proper memory management was added to it. And that was done, but not by Linus. So, which achievement sounds to you the most impressive? Building the first Linux? Or adding that (afaiu, critical) memory management…
I would say it really took off with userland package management - Debian in 1993 https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.os.linu... following SLS in 1992.
To me it feels that kernel debugging is the hard part; if you're lucky you get a nice clean panic with stacktrace, but if not the machine just locks up. Or overwrites critical parts of its filesystem. Or, in some extreme cases, is bricked and will never boot again.
"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code" That's kind of interesting now. Most Linux installations today coexist with a management processor running Minix. So what was a sort of mild rivalry is now a détente.
So free of any Minix code, means, it's free software, primarily. Not really a slight against Minix, per se.
I remember when I first installed Linux and was trying to find my way around (1994ish) and I couldn't help but feel hopelessly behind, like everybody had way more experience than I did, and knew way more than I did. Funny thing was, of course, that WAS true at the time, but it wasn't a reason not to do it. Let that be a lesson to anyone who hasn't learned the lesson themselves yet!
https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection-para...
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And yet with all that ... I likely still won't understand what exactly the product or thing is or does. Meanwhile I understand Linus's email well enough.
I can't count the number of times I've read an announcement of some OSS project, gone to the project home page, read it all and still had absolutely no idea what it was, what it did or why it might be important. It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though. Getting bash and gcc working and a multithreaded FS is no mean feat, and is enough for other people to actually make useful contributions with…
I remember when I first installed Linux and was trying to find my way around (1994ish) and I couldn't help but feel hopelessly behind, like everybody had way more experience than I did, and knew way more than I did. Funny thing was, of course, that WAS true at the time, but it wasn't a reason not to do it. Let that be a lesson to anyone who hasn't learned the lesson themselves yet!
Followed the instructions, got it installed on a spare machine at work, rebooted and it was working! Logged in and tried some command (I think it was "dir")
I got back "bash: dir: command not found" (although I recall it as "syntax error" so my memory is fuzzy)
I was taken aback. Did I really make such a huge mistake that the operating system wanted to bash me?
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Exactly. It makes me cringe. A majority of the firms looking to hire in the "Who's Hiring" thread have inflated self-worth.
As a developer the company can have whatever view of itself it cares to have as long as my paycheck clears.
> It is NOT protable Made me laugh, as I don't know any other OS that runs on such a variety of hardware nowadays ;-)
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Based on the pitches I’ve seen, it’s very much the opposite. ”We are about to completely upend the X industry, with a market potential of hundreds of billions”
"We are disrupting the AI blockchain cannabis industry using state of the art AR/VR technology"